Government & Politics

4:43 pm

Mon October 21, 2013

Medicaid Expansion Study

The General Assembly panel that will decide whether and how to expand Medicaid in Virginia took a look today at the experiences of other states.

The Medicaid Innovation and Reform Commission was especially interested in cost-controlling factors, aspects that worked, and mistakes to be avoided. The authors of research studies that crunched the numbers also attended.

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1:08

Anne Marie Morgan reports.

Some analysts said Virginia’s supply of doctors would not cover all new enrollees, in part because the program pays them only 80- percent as much as Medicare. They said a better option is to enroll many through the subsidized health insurance exchange, which provides better pay for doctors.

Drew Gonshorowski with the conservative Heritage Foundation said federal funds that pay for the expansion through 2016 would be beneficial at first—until the state had to pay 10 percent of costs, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. “And those sorts of costs have negative economic impacts in the future that we’re not talking about. And we would expect that in order to fund this, we’re going to have to cannibalize other social programs.”

The Commonwealth Institute’s Massey Whorley disagreed. “That stands in stark contrast to the 50 percent that we pay for our base Medicaid population. So even at 10 percent, Medicaid expansion is a very good deal for Virginia.”

A Tennessee official said his state’s expanded program costs skyrocketed until the state enacted reforms and disenrolled 172,000 people.